One Squad Race brings its car park relay to Singapore this June

Singapore's running calendar is built largely around the familiar: park connectors at dawn, reservoir loops, the occasional road closure through the city centre. On Squad Race, which arrives at Perennial Business City on June 13, takes a different approach. The course is a single spiralling car park ramp. Runners descend it, climb back up, and hand off to a teammate waiting at the start.

The event is the Singapore stop of a global series from Swiss sportswear brand On, launched in Beijing in April and travelling through Berlin, Tokyo, Barcelona, Sydney, and a dozen other cities before a world final in Los Angeles this September. Between 40 and 60 local squads will compete on the day. Each squad fields four runners, with a maximum of two men, and completes four laps of the ramp in relay format. The fastest team from each city qualifies for the final.

The choice of venue is deliberate. Multi-storey car parks share a common architecture across cities, which makes them a workable canvas for a travelling format. They also sit outside the usual vocabulary of road racing. There are no finish-line gantries or kilometre markers, only raw concrete, a hard gradient, and the sound of a crew waiting on the level above for the baton to come up.

The relay structure shifts the centre of gravity of the race. Individual pace matters less than the consistency of the team, and the format favours crews that already train together over assembled groups of strong runners. That suits the current shape of Singapore's running scene, which has grown denser in recent years around established crews and the weekly social runs that have quietly become a fixture of the city's evenings.

On is using the series to introduce the Cloudmonster 3, the brand's latest cushioned trainer, which participants can trial at the venue. Squads also receive a Performance T styled after tour merchandise, a small detail that signals the audience the brand is courting: runners for whom the sport is closer to identity than exercise.

Whether the format holds up depends on execution. Spiral ramps are unforgiving terrain, and a relay across more than forty squads in a single venue is a logistical exercise as much as a sporting one. The Beijing edition went off cleanly, which suggests the operational template is sound. The question for Singapore is which crews enter, and how seriously they take it.

Registrations are now open. Visit On Squad Race for full details and to register a squad.

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This article was first published in City Nomads.